Catherine Goldberg and I have a new piece on the New Energy /Industrial Strategy Center's substack on what my lab's flagship project--the Clean Industrial Capabilities Explorer--reveals about the global race for clean energy manufacturing. 🧵
We need a competitiveness strategy that takes China's actual strengths seriously and mounts a real response. That's what I try to argue in today's piece. 9/9
Germany, Japan, Korea are all building strategies to help their manufacturers deploy digital tools. America keeps funding frontier AI research while neglecting diffusion and deployment. We've got the technology. We're not getting it into factories. 8/
The labor market stakes are real. Automation is coming whether we plan for it or not. The question is whether American workers are trained to use these tools and share in the gains — or whether we fall behind and lose the jobs anyway. 7/
When manufacturers do try to automate, they often rely on imported robotics and sensors. The Trump administration is now investigating those supply chains for national security risks — potentially tariffing the very equipment we need to catch up. 6/
Meanwhile, most American factories can't connect their legacy machines to digital systems. Many don't have workers trained to use AI tools. Most can't afford the upfront costs. There's no national strategy to change any of that. 5/
And they've built the infrastructure to spread that everywhere — shared data standards, worker training, government-supported digital networks that let small suppliers plug in without starting from scratch. 4/
China's real edge isn't cheap labor or subsidies. It's that they've figured out how to deploy AI and automation on the factory floor at scale. 3/
The bipartisan consensus is: that China cheats, so we need tariffs and subsidies to level the playing field. There's some truth to that. But it badly misses the deeper challenge. 2/
China automates while America hesitates. I have a piece in the NYT today arguing that America's strategy to compete with China in manufacturing is fundamentally misconceived — and that we're heading toward a reckoning we're not prepared for. 1/
www.nytimes.com/2026/02/24/o...
This is an excellent article by my colleague @jonasnahm.com. American innovation has been captured by a Silicon Valley mindset, and this has important disadvantages... www.nytimes.com/2026/02/24/o...
This somehow assumes that government money was diverted from green to AI, when in many ways the two are complementary. We could have had investment in AI and also lots of green energy investment that would have helped bring down electricity prices.
New on SHIFT KEY:
@robinsonmeyer.bsky.social hosts an emergency episode with Johns Hopkins’ @jonasnahm.com on the Supreme Court’s tariff ruling and what it all means for the energy transition.
Check it out here or wherever you get your podcasts:
podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/s...
Today on a special emergency episode of Shift Key: I’m joined by the great @jonasnahm.com to discuss the big SCOTUS tariff ruling; what it means for solar, EVs, and electricity; and why it’s time (alas) to learn about the other tariff powers the president can use — as well as their limitations.
Both tools require what industrial strategy always requires: sustained commitment across political cycles. That's the hardest part. Full piece here: 7/7
neiscenter.substack.com/p/the-trump-...
And whether partners actually commit — not just show up to a ministerial — depends on whether they see this as durable coordination or something to wait out. 6/
FORGE adds another layer. A preferential trading bloc spanning the U.S., EU, India, and Brazil means harmonizing tariffs and price floors across very different regulatory and political contexts. 5/
But a $12B fund across 60 minerals raises an immediate design question: buy low to protect downstream industries from price spikes, or buy high to prop up struggling producers? These are different instruments with conflicting incentives. 4/
Project Vault and FORGE are the first real attempt of this administration to build stable markets for critical minerals, not just production capacity. That's a meaningful shift. 3/
Until now the strategy was almost entirely supply-side — permitting, loans, equity stakes in mining projects. The problem: supply without demand certainty leaves new assets exposed when prices collapse. 2/
The Trump admin this month made its biggest move yet on critical minerals: a $12B commercial stockpile and a 50+ country trading bloc. I unpacked what these tools can and can't do in a new piece with Abby Wulf and Sarah Ladislaw. 1/
Economy added 130K jobs in January, but manufacturing gained just 5,000—after a long slide in the fall. Tariffs were supposed to bring production back, but factories still aren't hiring.
If we want reshoring to translate into durable jobs and successful local industries, we need a domestic competitiveness strategy. 8/8
The lesson for U.S. industrial policy isn’t simply to block foreign firms. It’s to think seriously about how domestic firms gain access to technology, capital, and skills. 7/
That’s the tension this case exposes: tariffs can shift where production happens, but they don’t by themselves close productivity gaps. 6/
Protection and reshoring can create incentives to modernize — but without financing and support for upgrading, they can also accelerate the exit of local firms that can’t invest fast enough. 5/
By contrast, many incumbent U.S. plants are decades old. Even well-run firms that have squeezed costs and invested at the margin struggle to finance wholesale upgrading. 4/
The Ohio plant won because it arrived with newer capital, higher automation, and production systems built for today’s auto industry. 3/
The case raises a basic question: if tariffs and incentives succeed in bringing manufacturing investment back to the U.S., are domestic firms actually in a position to compete? 2/
